[flexbackup-help] Newbie help please?

[s. k. <ke...@sp...>]

What an ordeal.  :-P

First, thanks for flexbackup.  I think it's just what I'm looking
for.  Once I have it actually working, it should be quite a nice tool.

I've installed it on one of my servers (running Debian
testing/Sarge).  I created a user account which can do passwordless
ssh logins to the server I'm trying to backup (Fedora Core 1 -
Blecchh!).  I spent some time trying to figure out how to get afio on
FC1 and finally gave up and went with tar instead.  I'm backing up to
disk, not tape.

To test it out, I ran (as root):

  flexbackup -set servhm

where "servhm" is defined as "f.q.d.n:/home" in /etc/flexbackup.conf.
That whipped along for quite a while, then complained:

tar: ./bbuser/.bash_history: Warning: Cannot open: Permission denied
tar: ./bbuser/.ssh: Warning: Cannot savedir: Permission denied

then:

Total bytes written: 886599680 (845MB, 694kB/s)
0+69304 records in
27721+1 records out
283866703 bytes transferred in 1254.644564 seconds (226253 bytes/sec)

ERROR: non-zero exit from:
ssh -l flexb f.q.d.n 'cd "/home" && find . -depth -xdev ! -type s ! \
     -regex ".*/[Cc]ache/.*" ! -regex ".*~"$ -print0 | \
     tar --create --null --files-from=- --ignore-failed-read \
     --same-permissions --no-recursion --totals \
     --label "level 0 f.q.d.n:/home Tue Mar 08 08:55:46 2005 tar+bzip2 from collector" \
     --verbose --sparse -b 20 --file - | \
     bzip2 -4; x=(${PIPESTATUS[@]}); i=0; while [ $i -lt ${#x[@]} ]; do [ ${x[$i]} -eq 0 ] || \
     exit ${x[$i]}; i=$(($i+1)); done' | dd ibs=10k obs=10k
     conv=noerror \
     of="/var/flexb/archive/f.q.d.n-home.0.tar.bz2"

ERROR: exiting


Why did it complain about bbuser and not the other users' files?  The
permissions on his home dir are the same as everyone else's and the
perms on those files are correct.

Why did it go through all that then blow away the archive it was
creating?  The index is still there, but no backup.

Why does the flexbackup command prompt me for the flexbackup user's
password?  How am I supposed to stuff this into a cron job when that's
going on?

I'm making the flexbackup user do the remote stuff via sudo.  What do
I need to allow in /etc/sudoers for flexbackup to work?

Thanks for any help you can offer.


-- 
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*)               http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling 
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